Hello,
I'm trying to sort out what the regulations/requirements/restrictions/certifications there are for commercial products containing Lithium Ion Cells (ie: 18650 cells).
I'm working on updating an old product that currently has a large lead acid battery, and want to upgrade the design to use Lithium cells instead for multiple obvious reasons. The idea is have 3-5 18650 cells in parallel with a simple 5V charge circuit (if I understand correctly, cells in parallel don't need balancing?), and then boost to 5V to power the components (old product ran on 12V, but modern equivalent components are designed for 3.3V-5V).
My issue is I'm having trouble figuring out what we need to do in order to certify the new product for sale. The old design has an internal Lead Acid Battery, and an external certified off the shelf charger, so we didn't need to do any other testing other than for our CE mark. But now we want the Lithium Cells with our own charge circuit, but plan to keep an external off the shelf power supply (either 5V barrel plug, or USB if we can keep the power requirements low enough). Everything I can find so far, UN 38.3, UL 1642, IEC 62133, seems to be about cells/batteries, but if I just take properly certified cells and plug them into a board (I don't even plan to weld them, just snap in holders, maybe some zip ties or silicone), do I need to do any additional certification? We have international sales currently, so I imagine this could be a bit of a mess?